Education, Political Trust, and Perceptions of Distributive Justice——An Empirical Research in China

Abstract

Using data from the General Social Survey of Wuhan in 2014, this paper designs three paths to analyze the direct and indirect effects between education and perception of distributive justice   income. The first path explores whether education directly affects people’s feeling of distributive justice. The second path connects education to socioeconomic status in to determine whether higher status creates a higher perception of distributive justice. The last path introduces political trust as mediating variable to evaluate the relationship between political trust and justice perception. Results show that only education can promote the feeling of justice through improving people’s political trust.